Hey thanks for the kind words about my site design! It’s evolved over the years to something I’m really happy with (until the next time I realize it needs a whole new face).

Any plans to attend SxSW this year? Maybe I’ll see you there.
John T Unger´s last blog ..Fire Imps Recycled Steel Sculpture

Frankly, I don’t feel you are being forthright here. Let’s take your points one by one.

1. Typepad export is broken. With Typepad built-in export, you do not get your permalinks. It’s that simple.

You guys charged $450 to migrate a Typepad user to Moveable Type from which there is a clear exit path. That offer seems to have been taken off your site. It used to reside here under Typepad services.

I would like to see a list of some of the users for whom you performed the free Typepad to WordPress migration with permalinks. Seeing is believing.

2. Business is great, thanks for asking. Just keep Typepad export broken and watch us prosper. Typepad to WordPress is a tiny part of our business, but it’s booming.

3. Actually, I’m just one of a number of people to catch you out on this issue, Anil. Lloyd Budd caught you thrice.

To call such a concerted effort at disinformation stonewalling or obfuscation would be generous.

4. Yes, we did have a three hour conversation. But once again you are misrepresenting my motivations in wishing to help SixApart improve Typepad export. My own website was trapped in Typepad for two years. We published a seventeen step in-depth guide so DIYers could do it themselves, a guide which has helped hundreds to move successfully away with permalinks and images and comments, albeit at the cost of dozens of hours. My underlying goal is to help other people who’ve outgrown Typepad to be able to move away without losing their permalinks. Or do you think losing your permalinks and Google rankings is the price people should pay for moving away from Typepad, Anil?

In our telephone conversation, you did try to bury me in FUD about the Atom API. Unfortunately, your implementation of the Atom API will not allow a working export of all posts for different reasons than the standard export (won’t gather all posts). I did in-depth research after our conversation including trying all the existing tools which you named. Details about the Atom API and Typepad here.

What amazes me Anil is that you can keep repeating what you know by nowis not true, even after capable programmers have painstakingly explained the nuts and the bolts of the issues publicly on the web.

Every time you trot out the same stale excuses for not implementing a five minute tweak to fix the default export template in Typepad (include the permalink and the tags field, that’s it), your credibility on this issue slips away.

Until SixApart fix Typepad export, it makes no sense for anyone to ever start a weblog on Typepad.

That you are sending Foliovision additional business by frustrating thousands of Typepad customers from moving their successful weblogs away from Typepad with permalinks is your own fault. Please do not hold me responsible for you and SixApart shooting yourself in the foot.

Give your customers a choice about staying or going. That’s all I’ve asked from the beginning and that’s all I ask now. It’s a pity that they are either held hostage by you or have to pay us stiff fees to get them out safely (it’s such a hassle, we have no choice).

Do the right thing. Fix Typepad export already, Anil.

Better late than never.

Alec, I understand your frustration and you’ve certainly made your point well-known. You’re right in that permalinks being not an automagic part of export from TypePad is annoying, but we’re fixing it. Not to sound too community-managerial here, but please, let’s keep the tone and content here polite, respectful, and most of all valuable to everyone, as we’re visitors to this blog.

As Des says, there’s different platforms for everyone.
ginevra – TypePad Community Manager´s last blog ..burial | fostercare

* TypePad’s always allowed you to export all your data. If customers need help, they only need ask the support team for any assistance and it’s gladly given at no additional cost.
* I’ve spoken to literally tens of thousands of Six Apart customers and community members of the last seven years, and read nearly every single blog post and tweet mentioning the company and its products or services, and in all that time Alec is the first person who has ever accused me of lying. Certainly I’ve had my share of disagreements, and I wouldn’t suggest every person who’s ever talked to me has left happy, but there is a pattern to judge by.
* Alec is, as with his conversation in this thread, deliberately misrepresenting the (nearly three hour-long) conversation I had with him. He asked for Six Apart to provide customer data in a format of his specification, to make it easier for his team to work with the data. I explained that this is what APIs (programming interfaces) on the platforms are for, and he seemed fundamentally unfamiliar with the concept of APIs and indignant that I would suggest this ignorance indicated a fundamental incompetence on the part of his company.

In the literally thousands of hours I’ve spent talking to Six Apart customers, partners, staff, community members and customers, Alec (foliovision) stands alone as the only person who has ever deliberately misrepresented my words to others and publicly slandered me. It’s unfortunate that this tactic, along with his literally hundred of tweets about me has failed to help his business, but as he’s charging hundreds of dollars for a service that TypePad users get for free, it’s no wonder that he’s gotten desperate.

I apologize for the length here, Des, and I appreciate you working to create valuable resources for business bloggers.

Valeria, I wanted to mention that if you’d like to have an icon show up for you at Des’s weblog, you just need to register for a Gravatar at WordPress/Automattic: http://en.gravatar.com/

You can attach several email addresses to a single gravatar and they do show up retroactively, so it’s a great way to add a face to your comments.

I don’t seem to have much luck with PR types, I’ll grant you that. They are either running out on their bills or trying to reorganise our carefully thought out workflow for us.

Strange as I would actually like to be doing some more PR for our clients and would have been quite happy to trade in kind for some PR help.

I don’t see my remarks about you above as disparaging, more perplexed. Stuart Bruce on the other hand is another case altogether. In eight years running Foliovision and its antecedents, he’s the only one to earn the black stripe.

In fact, I almost didn’t post that article at all, but hey Winona Ryder got picked up for shoplifting too and that was printed in the paper. Eat and run is not on.

I believe Stuart Bruce’s antics coloured my perceptions of dealing with the PR world at just the time you and I were corresponding.

But you’re right, that’s not fair. If you held me to account for every bad experience you’ve had with web designers and developers, you’d probably push extra designers and supervisors into the project to try to get some kind of accountability out of the web design team. Which wouldn’t be fair either, as we really take care of our clients and are very, very serious about our SEO.

Hey wait, isn’t that what happened?

What will it take to untie the Gordian knot of mistrust between the PR industry and SEO field? Or between the PR industry and the web development profession?

Cordial regards, Alec Kinnear

Ginevra from Six Apart has been a constant help. However, TypePad would not be my recommendation for someone who’s looking to grow the blog beyond a hobby or a part time endeavor.

Mr Alec Kinnear has a fascinating recollection of our interaction. What I find most interesting is that he seems to be alright with telling potential clients off and posting disparaging and inaccurate remarks about them online. I would indeed have hired Foliovision, had it not been for the experience of corresponding with Mr Kinnear and for his inability to listen. I don’t have a team, just one person helping me with several projects

Perhaps this other incident was on Mr Kinnear’s mind? http://foliovision.com/2009/09/11/stuart-bruce-wolfstar-consultancy-pr/
Valeria Maltoni´s last blog ..Reactions to the 100 PR People Worth Following List

http://stevemartin.com
ginevra – TypePad Community Manager´s last blog ..burial | fostercare

I could agree with you that Typepad has a lot of great features, except for one fatal flaw. It’s next to impossible to get your site out of Typepad, as SixApart has deliberately crippled export.

Anil Dash gets really angry with people who call him on this, so expect him to turn up with some fabrications about all the different export options. The laughable part of his excuses is none of them work. The contemptible part of his excuses is that it’s a five minute fix to the main export button template to permalinks.

Curiously one of your Typepad examples, Valeria Maltoni wanted to switch to WordPress. In the end, Valerie wanted to bring in a project manager and a designer and an additional SEO expert and turn what is something we do every day – Typepad to WordPress conversion – into a three ring circus. You know the kind of circus I mean: an advertising agency type project where everyone gets paid except the team doing the actual work.

Finally, we declined to convert her as the hassle to payment ratio was just too high. A pity, as I like Valeria’s weblog and we would have done a crackerjack job for her as for all the other sites we’ve converted. WordPress would be a lot better for her site’s future development.

So Valeria Maltoni would like to be on WordPress, but Anil Dash and SixApart are effectively holding her hostage via her permalinks.

So yes, use Typepad if you want to be permanently trapped in an adequate but inferior platform, beholden to a company that is holding your data for ransom.

Until Typepad fixes export to include permalinks, no one should even consider using Typepad.